Over the past two weeks the interweb has exploded with news that Pinterest showed a drop in users since it successfully skyrocketed into the social media world in 2011. It’s amazing how many people were surprised by this considering that it’s total unique number of visitors increased by over 2700% since May 2011 according to service agency Modea. A drop was inevitable.

But for all you loyal “pinners” fear not, the virtual pin board site has only one thing in mind for the future and that’s to grow, grow, grow. Pinterest is already planning translating the site into German, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish stating on its blog that

“At Pinterest, we’ve always wanted to make it easy for people all over the world to organize and share all the beautiful things they find on the web. We want to take another step towards making this vision a reality by translating Pinterest into other languages.”

To put things into perspective the combined population of JAPAN ALONE is a staggering 127,450,459. That’s a lot of potential “pinners”. The post went on to say that other languages it plans on translating to in the future include Dutch, Italian, Malay, Polish, Simplified Chinese, Greek, Swedish and Turkish.

In order to enable its users to credit the people who create content Pinterest have announced that they are working with “Flickr and other communities to make it easier to pin and credit content creators”. This is great news for people putting up strong content as each piece of content they create and pin will link back to them. This should make it easier for businesses who create pin-able content to increase their followers and drive traffic back to their sites.

It’s gotten to the stage where business owners are beginning to recognise the power of Pinterest and the traction it’s gained especially with the female population. A whopping 68.2% of overall users are female while 97% of Pinterest’s Facebook fans are women according to Modea. A recent study by Rjmetrics showed that Pinterest is “retaining and engaging users as much as 2 – 3 times as efficiently as Twitter was at a similar time in its history”. Pretty impressive.

What do you think of the buzz around Pinterest? Do you use it for your own business? Do you receive much traffic from it?

Web Sales Marketing -

The story of the big bad wolf and the three little pigs sparks a nostalgic stir in each and every one of us regardless of our upbringing, class, or nationality. It’s a tale that’s stood the test of time and on the 29th of February 2012 was fired into the modern world in a video created for the Guardian.

The video is absolutely fantastic. It literally couldn’t be any better. This is the type of video marketing organisations strive to create. It’s clean, crisp, effective, to the point and its effectiveness as a viral video is proven by the fact that since its launch in February the video has amassed well over a million views and received thousands of comments on YouTube.

On top of that I keep watching it. I’ve probably watched it at least six times, been in a room after telling someone to watch it seven or eight times, and shared it on my Facebook, Twitter and Google+. That’s what a great viral video campaign should do to people:  grabs attention, engages and influences. 

The Guardian’s Three little pigs campaign was described as “how we might cover the story of the Three Little Pigs in print and online. Follow the story from the paper’s front page headline, through a social media discussion and finally to an unexpected conclusion.”

The video incorporates the trend of how breaking news hits social media in real time and creates discussion and engagement that was previously unheard of. Nothing else needs to be said, check it out, enjoy and share… And after you do, let me know what you think.

What’s your favorite viral video marketing campaign? Did you like the Guardian’s three little pigs open journalism campaign?

Web Sales Marketing -

On the 30th March the way Facebook company pages work drastically changed. This change is fundamental and your company needs to ensure you remain compliant with the updated Terms of Service from Facebook because they are not only changing how everything looks but also some of the rules about how everything works.

Typically when Facebook roll out a change in the layout or look & feel of their profiles for users, Facebook company pages (or fanpages) are usually not far behind. Most people are just now used to the new “Timeline” profiles which signals that it’s time to update company pages. Sure enough Facebook recently announced that on the 30th March all Company Pages would be updated to a Timeline styled look and feel.

Most Facebook company page owners have had access to a preview of how this new page will look but below are 3 essential things you need to know about your new Company Page.

Cover & Profile Images

This is the most immediately obvious change but along with looking different Facebook are introducing new rules about these cover photos.

To summarise, your cover photo should be an image that is 399px wide and should NOT contain:
• Price or purchase information (i.e. 40% off – download it at our website)
• Contact information for your company (that belongs in your About Section)
• Reference to any Facebook mechanisms/site features (i.e. – Click Like to…)
• Calls to action of any kind

Reading between the lines it would seem that Facebook want businesses to use the cover photo as a sort of store front for your business – you can show people what it looks like but not use that above the fold space to do any of the direct response marketing a lot of companies have been doing with their profile images.

For most business this is going to require some creative thinking to remain within the Facebook TOS whilst effectively using Facebook company pages to build your digital footprint.

Profile images will also be changed and are now going to be 180px by 180px. This image will be displayed alongside every post you make in the news feed so it should be a branded image that stands out and catches the eye.

Farewell tabs and hello applications

Don’t worry if you have a Welcome landing page setup it’s not going to be deleted, however the default landing tab no longer exists so that won’t be the first thing your visitors see when they land on your page. Again this will require some creativity to work around to ensure your visitors see the correct marketing messages.

Applications are the exact same as what were commonly referred to as tabs in previous incarnations of the Facebook page, however now you can showcase 12 apps in a grid format, but only four get prominence at the top of the page underneath the cover photo. The other 8 require your visitor to click a button to reveal them.

Customisation only extends to three of these applications as one of them is photo’s and it cannot be re-located.

According to Facebook their focus with these updates is to better enable story telling so each of your new applications should be targeted with the purpose of telling a story about an aspect of you’re your company offers.

Which brings me nicely onto the last major thing you need to know about the Facebook company page update.

Telling Stories

There are two major new features you will have access to on your Facebook company pages, and both open up all sorts of marketing possibilities. They are both connected to how you will be able to use your page to tell stories. In addition to these new features fundamentally the Timeline is different to how the wall used to be because your fan’s posts are now put in a different, meaning that the Timeline is now all about your company’s story.

The first new feature is that you can now highlight a story, picture or video that you’ve uploaded to your page so that it spans the entire width of the page. This is especially effective for photos and videos as they really pop out of the page.

To do this is simply a matter of clicking on the star in the upper right hand corner of a post you want to highlight.

You can also Pin any of the items on your pages’ Timeline to the top of your page for a week. This I’m sure will prove to be an immensely useful feature for businesses to promote specific projects or events with the use of eye catching photo’s, inforgraphics or animations.

The second major feature addition to Facebook company pages is Milestones. Milestones are a great way for you to add important events in the history of your company. Simply click on the line that goes down the middle of your Timeline (the cursor becomes a plus symbol) and the Milestone interface will pop open.

This allows you to retro-actively add items to your Timeline and I think it will prove to be a great way for companies to share their victory’s and become more personal to their audience.

This change in how Facebook company pages operate and look is a big one. There is a lot more focus now on allowing companies to tell their stories and with much more prominence put on visual elements. Of course the downside to this new opportunity is that a lot of companies will need to spend time and money updating various aspects of their pages.

What do you think of the new Facebook company pages? Are these new changes an improvement? How will they effect you?

Web Sales Marketing -

I love web apps. I unnecessarily sign up for them all the time. Once upon a time I had tested pretty much every CRM and Project Management tool in the Google Apps marketplace; one part because I needed one of each, one part because I was afraid of choosing the wrong one, and two parts because I love looking at the way different companies build their apps.  I love seeing how different people attempt to make complex systems simple.

There are lots and lots of web apps being created and launched each month, however only a handful have a substantial beneficial effect for their users. The term “game changer” is bandied around quite a bit (usually by CMO’s) and at this point its meaning has probably been diluted…well for me at least.

The apps below are apps I use. They made it onto this list because they fundamentally changed the way I and/or my team work on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. I’m sharing them with you, dear reader, because I hope they will do the same for you.

 1 – Google Apps

Now I know there’s nothing new about this tool but if you are a small business owner and you are not using Google Apps, you should be. There’s a free version and a low cost paid version (approx. $50 per user, per year!) and the suite of cloud based tools you get access to is nothing short of amazing.

For example, by connecting your domain name with Google Apps, you can have all of your company email run through Gmail. If you don’t like using the Gmail interface, no problem! You can easily just send the email out to your favourite desktop email client (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc).

Some of the benefits to using Google to handle your email are:

* Best SPAM fighting capabilities in the world because of their large user base
* Fast and very reliable email servers
* Practically unlimited storage for your mail
* Email integration with any Marketplace Apps added to your Google Apps account (e.g. create project tasks in Project Management Apps from emails, etc)
* No IT overheads, server archiving & backups
* And many more benefits…

The email capabilities and the ease with which you can enable your organisation with tools for everything through the Google Apps Marketplace would be enough of a reason to adopt Google Apps. However the suite of real time collaboration tools also comes with word processing, spreadsheets, calendar, Google+ and instant messaging, all of which contribute to better communications and collaboration, internally and externally for your organisation.

2 – Rapportive

This is hands down the most effective tool I think I have ever implemented in my business. Rapportive.com plugs in to Gmail and adds a column (sidebar!) on the right hand side of your email. When you type an email address into a To: bar, or if you open an email from somebody, the Rapportive sidebar populates with all of the social information about that person.

You can see if you are connected to them on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. If the person you are communicating with at that point in time is on any of your email lists (Mailchimp and Aweber). If you are connected to them you will see their latest Tweets and status updates on Facebook. Rapportive will also show you a summary of the conversation you’ve had over recent email.

It’s like a combination of an automatic relationship management tool, a memory aid tool and a social network growth tool all rolled into one awesome package. Best of all (for now at least) it’s free!

This tool is so good that it’s worth going and signing up for Google Apps, connecting your business domain and using Gmail for the benefits this app alone provides.

3 – Dlivr.it

The pros and cons of cross posting (is it the devil’s handiwork or just clever leverage of your time) is a debate for another day and another blog post, however I will say this: I believe it can be either depending on the way it is conducted.

Dlvr.it’s tag line is “You publish, we deliver”, and that’s exactly what this tool does. You connect your blog’s RSS feed to the service, and then your social media accounts and hey presto, when you publish a blog post, the content gets distributed to your social networks automatically.

Is this new technology? No of course not, publishing an RSS feed to social networks has been something we’ve been able to do for years now. BUT, now it’s really easy to setup, user-friendly to manage, gives you engagement stats, can be connected to Google Analytics and Feedburner, and basically does an all-around great job.

If you blog, or create content with RSS functionality, then you should go sign up now. It will help you increase the traffic to your website.

4 – Do.com

Do.com is the Project Management lovechild of Salesforce.com and Manymoon, but to look at it you would have to wonder who their postman was because Do.com looks like neither Salesforce or Manymoon!

Before choosing to use Manymoon for web design and internet marketing project collaboration here at Web Sales Marketing, I had a good look at the competing Project Management tools out there. Manymoon was (it’s been discontinued now that it was acquired by Saleforce) the best Project Management tool because it looked a little bit like an early, simple version of Facebook, and as a result was quite intuitive to use.

Do.com is even more user-friendly (read: idiot proof) which means the adoption time, learning curve for you and your staff, and consequently the time until its effective for your organisation will be as short as possible. As with Manymoon however, there are no Gantt charts.

Go forth and collaborate with ease: http://do.com

5 – Crowdbooster

Crowdbooster is basically a clever social media tool that will allow you to see how effective your social media efforts are. I’m sure they will increase their range of networks over time but at the moment it’s limited to Twitter and Facebook.

The Twitter data you get is quite useful, the Facebook data less so, particularly given that Facebook already gives you pretty good metrics about your efforts through Facebook Page Insights.

Still what I like about it is that it makes recommendation as to what times of day you should tweet based on the volume of your followers that will be active at any one time. It also tracks and reports on how effective you efforts are.

The app may still be in beta, but get your name on the list as it’s well worth checking out.

And so ends my roundup of the apps that I’ve found to be hugely influential in changing the way things are done here at WSM.

Do you have any web apps that you use on a frequent basis that you think are worthy of being on this list?

Feed my web app addiction and tell me all about them in the comments.

Web Sales Marketing -

First off, Happy New Year to you and your family from everyone here at WSM. I thought I’d take the opportunity of a New Year to write a post that I would never normally get the chance to write but that I think is fundamentally important to success in business, marketing, even in life.

Resolutions, Goals & Planning

Resolutions are timely for the start of a New Year but I also feel that the start of the year is a great time to look over your goals, re-examine your plan and just take a moment to evaluate progress.

There is a distinction between resolutions, goals and plans that is very important to understand when it comes to your business and your marketing. Resolutions are basically useless but they have an undeniable charm because they are easy.

“I’m resolving to spend less time on Facebook and more time on Google+ this year”, that would be great for my business growth, however it is extremely unlikely that making this resolution (which I have done) will amount to anything without goals and a plan to back it up (which I am working on for WSM right now).

Goals are next easiest and are in my opinion critical for success, be it with a marketing initiative, new business idea or even just a website build. As a business owner having a plan is also crucial and I find it of most benefit to create, or revise, my plan before developing a set of goals to achieve the plan.

Think about it like this: your plan is going to illuminate the pathway you will follow to success. Goals help you figure out how to get down the path. Both are very important in order for you to reach your destination as you will stray off the path, and your plan will help you find it again. There will be times when you question whether what you are doing is working, but your goals will help keep those to a minimum and will reduce the uncertainty.

I’m not going to explain how you should set your goals because there have been thousands and thousands of good posts written on it by people already. I like the section on goal setting found in this one here

WSM, goals & The Plan

Each year I spend time at the end of the year and the start of the New Year evaluating, revising my plan and looking forward to what can be achieved in the New Year. Sometimes this can take 2 full weeks of my time. I believe it’s that important.

I’m not quite finished The Plan for WSM for 2012 yet, however I can tell you that there will be all sorts of goodies for you to look forward to; free stuff, paid stuff and lots more besides. You should definitely stayed tuned

What have you got planned for 2012? Does it excite you? (hint: it should!)

Web Sales Marketing -

So in my last post about LinkedIn for business we talked about why LinkedIn is important and how it could be the single most beneficial tool for your business. Today I want to talk about 3 essential rules that if you follow will exponentially increase your chances of success using LinkedIn for business.

So let’s get to it:

1. Embrace your inner LION!!

LinkedIn works on a tiered networking system where you have different levels of connections. People can be 1st level, 2nd level or 3rd level connections. It works like this:

1st level connections are people you have directly been in contact with and have pro-actively added to your network either by requesting connection with them or accepting their request to connect to you.

2nd level connections are people who are connected to your connections but not directly to you. These connections are passively added to your network as your first level connections grow their networks.

3rd level connections are people who are connected to you through an additional degree of separation, so they are also added passively to your network when your 2nd level connections increase their networks.

Let’s take pause for a moment to examine a simple fact about using LinkedIn for business: have you heard the expression: “Bigger is Better”? Well with LinkedIn, bigger is definitely better!

I’m unsure if it’s because of the “I don’t know” option on the page where you send connection requests, or something psychological about the way the platform is designed, but I regularly meet people who say things to me like: “oh, well I have a LinkedIn account but I only connect to people on it that I’ve met in person”

If you are one of those people you absolutely must read to the end of this section because you’re mind-set is critically damaging your effectiveness on LinkedIn for business. Please read on…

When you perform searches only people who are “inside your network” will be searched. As a result it is very much in your interest to connect to as many people as possible because you will be growing your 2nd and 3rd level networks at a massive rate which will give you a much better chance of being able to find the right person when the time comes. For example, you might need to try and connect with journalists for a product launch to get some free PR.

If that journalist was already in your network it would be much easier to contact him/her, as is the case with anybody who can help your business become more successful, or help you have a better shot at finding a job or even getting head hunted.
Permit me a moment to tell you a story about how I have gotten business, and have been contacted about jobs (in this economy!) without actively looking for it on LinkedIn.

When I originally joined LinkedIn for business use I immediately saw its potential so I spent ages perfecting my profile, I joined some groups engaged in a few of the conversations and in the first year I grew my contacts by about 50 people.

About 6 months before founding WSM I had a chat with a friend of mine, who is a power user of LinkedIn and is probably connected to most of the people on LinkedIn at some level. He couldn’t say enough about the platform and because I was planning a B2B business and also because Social Media was a part of that, I decided to put my mind to the task of learning everything there was to know about LinkedIn.

First I made sure my profile was optimised properly and I became a LION (LinkedIn Open Networker, or some people say Leading International Open Networker – whatever label you wish to use, LION’s are people who use LinkedIn for Business every single day).

I will be covering how to Optimize your LinkedIn profile in upcoming editions of the Optimisation Project. If you’d like to receive these quickie steps into your inbox each week please enter your email address in the box over to the right at the top of this post

Then I began to accept requests from people I didn’t know. I also went out and sought out people that were in groups where we shared a common interest and worked hard to connect to as many people as I could, the RIGHT WAY*.

* see point 2 on connecting to people the right way. I am not advocating adopting a quantity at the expense of quality strategy.

Something magical happened. I broke through the 500 connections mark and all of a sudden instead of me having to go out to my network to find people and business, my network started to come to me!

In the last two months I’ve gotten two referrals for business from people who I’ve never met and just the other day I received an invitation to join a panel for a business awards event, where my company will get national coverage, for free!

At the time of writing this post I have more than 13 million people in my total network, and without me doing a thing the network is growing by about 20,000 people per day! I’m saying this, not to brag, but merely to illustrate the power of being connected to a lot of people.

It’s important to note that I accept connection requests from everyone and anyone who connects to me, but I am very careful to also go out to offline networking events. After the events I always connect to everyone I met. This has allowed me to build a very high quality network locally as well as globally.

If you haven’t already I’d encourage you join one or all of the LION’s groups. There is no cost to doing so and it will give your network growth a huge boost, if you get active in any of those groups.

2) It’s a “Social” network. Not a spam or ad network.

Actually this point really applies to pretty much any of the social networks but it’s particularly important on LinkedIn.

Connecting to people the right way is extremely important. First of all you need to remember that you are connecting to another human being who has their own set of needs, wants and desires. They are a professional, who most probably joined LinkedIn for business or employment opportunities and in all likelihood they are very busy.

For the love of all that is good and right in this world, do NOT just use the standard LinkedIn connection greeting when trying to connect on LinkedIn for business!

Address the person by their first name. Point out something you have in common and ask how business is going for them. This isn’t just an exercise in amassing numbers of connections, its also really important (as much as possible) to have had some sort of interaction with your network and introducing youself is the perfect chance to build some initial rapport.

Here’s a sample of a message I use, that I have found to be quite effective:
“Hi John, I noticed we are both members of the UK & Ireland Startup Entrepreneurs group, so I’d like to add you to my network. How’s business? Regards, Neil”

I then ALWAYS respond to any messages that get sent back to me. I’d strongly recommend you do too. It shows you are prepared to invest some of your precious time into creating a quality network and it will give you a base to speak to that person again in the future, should you need to ask him/her for an introduction to somebody else, or should you need to speak to him/her directly about something that matters.

It’s nice to be nice, and in this case perhaps eventually even profitable.

As the image above illustrates there are a number of different ways you can connect to somebody on LinkedIn for business, depending on what type of relationship you have with the person you are trying to connect to.

Please take note of the following rules of thumb for each of these options, which should be obvious but I see people breaking all of the time. There are penalties which I will explain in just a moment.

Colleague:
If you have worked with the person you are attempting to connect to in the company you choose from the drop down list then this is your best choice. It should NOT be used if you have not both worked for the same company.

Classmate:
Have you gone to the same school as the person you are trying to connect to? If not, then don’t use this option.

We’ve done business together:
To be used in a situation where you have bought or sold something to the person you are trying to connect with. This one can be used in some other situations, for example if you met someone at an offline networking event and you had a very good chat, got on great and intend to do business in the future. Do NOT use this option if it’s a case that you want (but haven’t as of yet) to do business with a future connection.

Friend:
Do NOT connect to people you do not know using this option. Ever.

All of the above methods of connection are designed for connecting with people you know very well. If you connect to someone you don’t know through any of these methods, the first impression that person has of you is that you are either: incompetent (don’t know what you are doing), lazy (couldn’t be bothered doing things the right way because it’s more work) or not trustworthy (attempting to connect under false pretences).

Also if you use any of those connection mechanisms and the person you attempt to connect to responds by clicking the “ignore”, and then the “I don’t know” or “report spam” button, then LinkedIn will start to demand you enter an email address for EVERYONE you attempt to connect to, even if you’re trying to connect to your mum!

Groups:
This is the single best way to connect to somebody cold (i.e. you’ve never met them). It gives you an opportunity to connect to them without needing to know their email address, and because you have something in common, the connection request is almost warm.

If you check out somebody’s profile before you attempt to connect you will see what groups they are in and if it’s a really important connection, you can join the group and then connect to the person.

However, as I will be covering in the 3rd rule for LinkedIn for Business below, this shouldn’t happen that often because you should have joined the max number of groups possible.

Other:
This is the safest way to connect to someone but that’s because you need to have the person’s email address, so the drawbacks here are pretty obvious.

I don’t know :
This option is a trick. Select it and LinkedIn will give you a little lecture about how you should only send invitations to connect to people you know personally. It won’t let you connect to the person, until you select a different option.

3) Join groups

Joining groups is a great way to interact with other LinkedIn users, they give you a chance to showcase your knowledge with people in your target market and most groups have an “Introduce yourself and your business” type of post where you can add a description of what you do, leave your email for people to connect to you, invite connection and regularly find a lot of other people who have invited you to connect to them.

More importantly if you are looking to connect to somebody in particular, joining a group that they already share is probably the easiest, quickest way to invite them to connect with you.

You have a limit of approx. 50 groups that you can be in at any one time so don’t be shy. Find groups that people who fit into your target market are active in and get involved with the conversations going on there.

Is that it?

There are lots of other ways you can really leverage your efforts on LinkedIn to produce even bigger results – such as “Creating Groups”, “Answering questions in the Answers section”, “Using your status updates properly” amongst others.

I hope to cover those tactics in future LinkedIn posts but for this edition I wanted to get the basics covered and at 2,000+ words I think I’ve kept you long enough!

Any questions? What LinkedIn for business tactics do you use?

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Web Sales Marketing

In the coming days, weeks and months you will notice some a number of fundamental changes (starting today with the new layout) to what and how we do things here at WSM.

First off an apology. From me, for not updating the blog at all in the last few weeks. I could give you a waffly excuse and say: we have been working very hard to realise the evolutionary changes that our business, the Internet at large, the latest web design principles and my vision for the company have demanded of us.

But I’d rather just give it to you straight…

WSM3.0 – What’s in it for you?

In a word, Awesomeness, if I say so myself! (Actually, I’m pretty sure that Awesomeness is not a word Mr Chambers, or Mr Collins would approve of, but I digress…)

Instead of just another digital agency/website company blog (tucked away at the back of our site somewhere), I wanted to create a site that is a real resource for people looking to know more about designing websites with WordPress and Internet marketing. So you will find our blog the primary part and main landing area of our website. Front and centre one might say, and rightly so!

You will also find all sorts of seriously cool resources for WordPress with the launch of some new area’s in the business: WSM Labs, WSM Studios to begin with and two other area’s I’ll tell you more about next year.

For the small and start-up business owner we will be launching WSM Jump Start at the beginning of 2012. You can sign up for the WSM Jump Start Beta program now and save your small business/start-up a fortune and save yourself a boat load of frustration.

A little history…

When I started WSM I wanted to try and change the Internet, one crappy, ineffective, useless brochure site at a time. I had years of experience and a genuine passion for Internet Marketing and building websites, so naturally I decided to set up a web design business that had a primary focus on the marketing part of the equation.

It seemed to me at the start of 2011 that the Internet had had its fill of useless websites. The social media revolution had quietened down from full blown warfare, to an occasional gunshot here and there as an ignorant CEO, MD or Business Owner slapped some blogger with a legal letter designed to prevent the blogger speaking about his/her poor experience with the company. (The result of course was the blogger blogged even more!)

The landscape on line had been torn apart and turned upside down in similar fashion to parts of Europe post WWII. Now on-line everyone had an equal voice. No more “HEY LOOK OVER HERE, OUR TV’S ARE THE BEST” shouted from the rooftops of big corporate websites. The millions of Web2.0 review sites saw to that. MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn had opened up the world to us in terms of instant access to whatever feedback we needed from people we trust. 

Despite knowing all the above, WSM1.0 was a crappy, ineffective brochure site. Now I know you’re probably reading this thinking, “but Neil, you just said you wanted to change the Internet one crappy site at a time”, and you are absolutely correct. Let me try and explain why I did that because this is a point which will  help you understand where the birth of WSM Jump Start came from. Web Sales Marketing was started on less than €5,000 , which accounted for my entire savings at the time of business registration. I bootstrapped the company which is just another way of saying that everything we bought and paid for since that initial investment has come from money the company made.

If you are an entrepreneur/business owner who started your own company, you will understand this: there are hundreds of things you need to do to get a company set up and off the ground. On your own, as I was then, there aren’t half the number of hours in a day there need to be to get everything done. Day 1 of any new business the burning question in the business owners mind should be “where can I get some customers to buy my product/service today”. Unfortunately there are a lot of other things you have to get sorted first, like a website, business cards, a telephone number, etc etc.

These things eat into the time you already don’t have enough of and so you have to compromise. My compromise was WSM1.0 but it was only a small compromise because I knew the CMS (Content Management System) I was using, WordPress, was the best around and that I’d be able to update the look and feel of the site completely without having to start from scratch.

WSM Jump Start was born to help new, young and small businesses to reduce as much as possible those initial delays in getting up and running by providing essentially all of the major things required to get started in business. The double whammy of awesomeness here is that we are also going to be offering this service at cut-throat rates. Having come from a bootstrapping background, I understand how critical to cash flow keeping initial costs down is.

WebSalesMarketing.com v2 was a big improvement in design and we’ve kept most of the look & feel from that site in our new home online, with a number of fundamental differences. Mostly these differences can be put down to some big changes in our approach to business. For example I have a team of very talented programmers and web designers who can work with HTML, CSS, PHP, AJAX and MySQL. We can handle projects that involve custom built sites, or Joomla/other PHP content management systems, but we no longer accept work of that nature.

We are now a 100% WordPress solutions business. Also wherever possible now the websites we build will be built on top of the Genesis Framework from StudioPress. This offers security and SEO benefits and is in the best interests of our clients. WSM3.0 is built upon it.

Welcome aboard Web Sales Marketing 3.0 on our inaugural flight!

I feel that we have always provided value that was unmatched but up until now it was really only our clients who benefited from that. With WSM3.0 all that will change and it is our sincere hope that you find immense value here and that you become part of our community. So please say hello in the comments!

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What is LinkedIn?

There is a saying knocking around that goes: Facebook is for the people that you know and LinkedIn is for the people you don’t know. It’s absolutely true and if you are looking to build a high quality network of B2B contacts then this post is going to be valuable for you! With everything you do online it is critical that the fundamental things are done correctly, so whether you regularly use LinkedIn or are just about to go set up an account for the first time there should be something in this post for you.

Signing up for an account is simple and free to begin with. You can upgrade to a paid account if you wish which does give you additional features and benefits but for the vast majority of people the free account is all you will ever need.

LinkedIn can be an incredibly powerful B2B networking tool to assist you in connecting with the right kind of people and businesses to grow your own business.

Let’s take a very quick look at some stats:

In November 2010 LinkedIn reported there were 353,391 users of their platform in Ireland.

In terms of usage:
59% of users were looking for new contacts
50% were maintaining relationships with existing contacts
49% were browsing for potential job opportunities
45% were updating work/project status
33% were browsing contact’s status updates
10% were browsing for people to hire

*Source – Irish Internet Association State of the nation report

If your business caters to the global marketplace you will be interested to know that LinkedIn passed the 1 new member every second milestone almost a year ago and that the fastest growing sector for the platform is outside of the US.

Check out the infographic below (source: LinkedIn) for more detail:

Yeah but why should I care?

I have gotten business from LinkedIn directly and passively in the last 3 months. I have also had amazing opportunities to promote my business that I never even realised existed appear into my Inbox on LinkedIn.

Irrespective of if you are in business for yourself or if you are in employment, LinkedIn can have a massive effect on your professional life. There are businesses on LinkedIn, as you read this, finding new leads, building new joint venture partnerships, collaborating on marketing initiatives, getting great free PR for their business, funding business and participating in conversations that are raising their profile as an authority on a subject.

Social networks are about people however, and when I speak of how companies are doing all these great things, what I really mean is that the people who collectively represent these businesses, are doing the deals, getting business in and forming new partnerships.

You should care about LinkedIn because using it correctly will help your business and your career.

I’d love to hear if you’ve had any positive or negative experiences with LinkedIn? What is LinkedIn in terms of a B2B networking tool to you?

Web Sales Marketing -

Welcome to the 4th and final part of Optimising your Facebook for search. Today’s taks is actually more of an ongoing task, that you can do whenever you have the time. Its well worth doing as it will drive traffic and engagement levels.

This is a pro-active activity template that you can repeat again and again, and the great thing is that the more you do it, the more you will accrue links to your facebook page and to your website. The other benefit is that the more you do it, if you do it correctly, the more targetted traffic you will drive to your website.

I love to write but it occurred to me during last week that this kind of blog series would be better communicated to you by short video’s so that you can actually see what I’m doing to minimise the chance of misunderstanding.

So, check out the video below, and if you like it, please share it, and as always if you have any questions, please leave a comment.

This concludes our facebook optimization posts for the moment, but fear not! I have lots more in store for you, including Optimising your web pages, your YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook for conversion, and much more! Stay tuned!

Have you tried Optimising your Facebook page? 

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Welcome to the 3rd instalment of the Optimisation Project series.

Twice per week I will be bringing you one actionable thing you can do to optimise your website, your blog or your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube profiles and pages.

Each task will be as short as I can make them because I know you are busy, but if you follow along all tasks you will see a huge improvement in your visibility on line and also the level of engagement you have with your customers and prospects.

If you would like to receive these updates into your inbox to be sure you don’t miss any, then please subscribe over to the right of this post.

Today we are going to be doing the 2^nd last instalment of the Optimising Facebook Pages for Search part of this project. If you’ve missed them you should go back and complete Step 1 and Step 2 before doing this one.

Step 3: Optimising your Facebook Fanpage for Search

Today’s Task:

• Add a Facebook Fan Box to your website

This task is easy for anybody using WordPress for their CMS (Content Management System). Web Sales Marketing is predominantly a WordPress house, so for the purpose of these Optimisation Project posts I will be explaining how to do things with WordPress.

I’m sure there are probably great plugins/add-ons etc for Joomla, Drupal and the other popular CMS’s out there though and the theory is still the same irrespective of what platform you use.

So the steps you need to take to Add a fanbox to your WordPress site are as follows:

1)      Firstly login to your wp-admin and go to the “Add New” menu item in the Plugins menu.

2)      Type “Facebook Like Box” into the search field and click the Search button

3)      Install the plugin of the exact same name. It should be the top search result.

4)      Go to the Widgets menu, under the appearances tab

5)      Drag the “Facebook Like Box” widget over into your sidebar and configure as you please!

You will need to log into your Facebook fanpage to get your Page ID. This can be gotten by clicking on the name of your page in the left menu of facebook. When your fanpage comes up, you should click on the Edit button on the top right hand side of the page.

In the address bar of your browser you will now be able to see your Page ID.

Copy this and paste it into the relevant field in the Facebook Like Box widget. Hey Presto you now have a like box on your website. Don’t be afraid to play around with the other settings but I’d recommend changing just one at a time and then checking the differences.

In the next instalment we reach the end of our Facebook optimisation for search when I share with you a task that will help not only Search Optimisation but will also help build your page likes but will also get you more traffic to your site.

Until then in the words of Ringo Star – Peace and Love, Peace and Love!!

Neil

Optimising your Facebook fanpage for search is an essential step for businesses. Check out Part one and Part two of our optimising your Facebook fanpage for search post series.

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